Long seen as the low-hanging fruit for businesses to implement voice biometric technology, allowing employees to reset passwords and get access to corporate services through voice verification is an increasingly common tool for IT help desks.

This is especially true for large enterprises with thousands of employees spread across multiple locations. Organizations are looking to cut costs by automating the high-volume password-reset process and make it convenient for employees to access and change passwords at any time.

No stranger to password reset applications, Nuance has provided large, customized solutions for big enterprises such as Comcast and Kaiser Permanente. Now Nuance hopes to target the small- and medium-sized business market with the release of FastReset, the company’s first out-of-the-box product for password reset applications.

The way it works is that employees are asked to enroll using any kind of phone and repeat a passphrase that captures their voiceprint. When they call into an automated system to change their password, they’re asked to speak a prompted phrase with the system checking for a successful match. FastReset comes preconfigured, integrates with Microsoft’s Active Directory, and can be implemented in a matter of hours, says Brett Beranek, Solutions Marketing Manager, Enterprise Marketing with Nuance.

Eastern Bank is Nuance’s first FastReset customer. With headquarters in Boston, Mass., Eastern Bank has 1600 employees in more than 100 locations, managing some $8 billion in assets banking, investments, and insurance.

Beranek sees password reset as an enabler for more downstream, customer-facing voice biometrics apps. Indeed in our own research, and IBM agrees, that password reset apps are the introduction of multifactor authentication that could ultimately replace passwords in number of use cases including banking, healthcare, government transfer payments, and mobile commerce.

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